Whose God?Buber's "Eternal Thou" as "Absolute Person"

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

—T. S. Eliot, Litt le Gidding, I

Martin Buber (1878–1965), the world renown philosopher of dialogue, would have smiled deeply in response to the question Mishael Caspi (1933–2013) addressed to participants of interreligious dialogues.¹ Buber would have smiled because he recognized that Professor Caspi's question was two-sided. The question "Whose God?" was printed on one side of a coin; Buber realized that on the other side the coin-holder should read "Who is God?" Buber smiled because he recognized that an adequate response to these questions required pondering everything from traditional teachings, textual interpretations, and institutional beliefs and practices, all the way to an individual's personal insights, intuitions, and experiences. In addition, he knew that attempting to understand or explain what the word "God" means was as deeply meaningful to religious practitioners as it was to interreligionists.

As a Baptist, Buddhist, Benedictine Catholic Oblate, and Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religious Studies at the San Jose (CA) State University, who participated in, taught, and wrote about interreligious discourse, I remain grasped by the utt er significance of Caspi's question.² Not that it yields a definitive answer. No. Instead, these questions invited me to search, or bett er, to be searched by them, which has led me to explore how Buber would have addressed them as an interreligionist.³

Recognizing these questions as co-requisite considerations for honest and fruitful dialogue, Buber wrote: "[W]hatever else [God] may be . . . ,"⁴ God is a nameless presence. To name the nameless, Buber explored the relationship between two central interreligious spheres of sacred immediacy: (1) the Eternal Thou as (2) the Absolute Person. Based on my dialogue with Buber's insights, I find myself bett er prepared to ask interfaith interlocutors provocative questions (including "Why does God need you?") and to respond to questions from others (including "Who are you for God?").

The Eternal Thou

One of Buber's most significant, yet difficult, insights in I and Thou he called the Eternal Thou. Buber began I and Thou by saying there are two primary word pairs (I-It and I-Thou) representing two types of human relations: I-It (monological, using, experiencing, one-sided, controlling) and I-Thou (dialogical, two-sided, mutual, spontaneous, present). Only in I-Thou relations is God present. As Buber indicated on several occasions, the central tenet of his lifework was that the I-Thou relationship between persons (mutual, direct, spontaneous, present) intimately reflects the I-Thou relationship humans have with God. Genuine relationship with any particular Thou manifests glimpses of the Eternal Thou. Thus, Buber's use of the word Thou has a twofold referent: both as a temporal Thou (an "other" who can become It), and the Eternal Thou (who cannot become It). Early in Part I of I and Thou, we read: "In every sphere in its own way, through each process of becoming that is present to us we look out toward the fringe of the eternal Thou; in each we are aware of a breath from the eternal Thou; in each Thou we address the eternal Thou."⁵

Reading through I and Thou, one sees clearly that Buber's dialogical stand is inseparable from his view that God not only can be glimpsed in genuine dialogue but also reaches out to humans by penetrating our speaking.⁶ Therefore, the extended lines of genuine relationships allow us to glimpse the presence of the Eternal Thou. As Buber wrote:

Every particular Thou is a glimpse through to the eternal Thou; by means of every particular Thou the primary word addresses the eternal Thou. Through this mediation of the Thou of all beings fulfilment, and non-fulfilment, of relations comes to them: the inborn Thou is realised in each relation and consummated in none. It is consummated only in the direct relation...